- Brian Morrissey

NEW YORK The Barbarian Group is beefing up its strategic offering by adding Noah Brier from Naked Communications.
 
Brier, 26, has joined Barbarian as director of planning and strategy, tasked with knitting together the strategic fabric of various agency projects.

While the official role is new, the job has been covered on an ad-hoc basis by the shop's three top executives: CEO Benjamin Palmer, president Bruce Winterton and COO Rick Webb. For a long time, Webb said, clients have looked to Barbarian -- best known for building Burger King's Subservient Chicken site for Crispin Porter + Bogusky -- for more than just Web production, and the addition of Brier's marks another step in that expansion. Another example: the agency added a user-experience department last year.

"We often find ourselves saying this is how you need to get this done, and we don't do that at all," said Webb. "What Noah did at Naked is what we needed to validate and expand on what we do to execute for clients."
 
Brier spent two years at Naked in New York, where he was a planner working on the Acuvue account. He also taught himself code and created Brandtags.net, a site where visitors tag products and services with the first thing that pops into their minds. Over 1 million tags have been created since the site launched in May.
 
Prior to Naked, Brier worked at Renegade Marketing, a New York digital shop. He began his career as a writer at American Demographics.
 
Barbarian presented an opportunity to return full-time to digital work while also giving him a hand in guiding the creative process, Brier said.

The Boston-based company produces Web work for several agencies, including BBDO. It also has its own clients like MTV, CNN and several online start-ups. In April, it launched an application for CNN that sells visitors T-shirts emblazoned with recent news headlines.
 
"At the end of the day, I really like the Web and technology," Brier said. "I like thinking about it, talking about it and being around a bunch of uber-geeks. Part of what excited me is they have chops to do really big things."